An Atlin-area game guide is $8,000 poorer after a provincial court judge fined him for breaching four B.C. laws protecting wildlife.

A little less than half of that sum will go into provincial coffers as a fine.

Jamie Allen Schumacher, owner and operator of Indian River Guides and Outfitters, must pay the rest to the Habitat Conservation Trust Fund.

'In my view, fines must be high enough so that within the industry they attract attention,' B.C. provincial court Judge John Milne said at the sentencing.

'That is what general deterrence is all about, and in particular in relation to guides and not simply the general recreational hunter. So the fine, in my view, has to be set at a level that will attract the attention of guides.'

Schumacher, who owns a guiding territory near Atlin, was sentenced in Smithers, B.C., on May 14.

On Oct. 2, 2001, Schumacher flew into one of his base camps, at Line Lake, B.C., on a charter flight.

The guide left Atlin at 8:15 a.m. for the 20-minute flight, heading northeast into the mountains looking for animals, according to an agreed statement of facts.

He spotted moose, caribou and sheep en route, and the Atlin Air Charters aircraft made four or five passes along a mountain range in sight of Line Lake to observe some sheep, which had been seen from camp during the past week.

When he arrived at camp to join U.S. hunter Rick Baker and wrangler Cody Noeth, the guide company owner watched sheep he'd seen overhead through a spotting scope.

He, Baker and Noeth left camp on horseback to go after the sheep. At that point, all three men carried firearms.

At noon, Schumacher and his client left the horses and wrangler behind to stalk the sheep, with only Baker carrying a firearm.

Within several hundred metres, the guide told Baker one sheep was a legal ram, and at 1:30 p.m., Noeth heard the seven shots Baker fired to kill the sheep.

The horns and cape of the sheep seized from the U.S. hunter were forfeited to the Crown.

Schumacher had pleaded guilty to three offences guiding more than two hunters at a time and falsifying two different types of reports but contested the charge for hunting sheep within six hours of being airborne in an aircraft other than a scheduled commercial aircraft.

That section of B.C.'s Wildlife Act is designed to remove any advantage to a hunter from using aircraft to look for wildlife before hunting. Forcing hunters to wait six hours gives wildlife time to move on.

The hearing into that matter was held last January, with a decision coming down in late April.

Defence had pointed out that Schumacher had left his gun behind when the U.S. hunter closed in on the animal, and argued the guide and company owner was guiding, not hunting.

'In my view, the accused did not exercise reasonable care to avoid the occurrence of the offence,' wrote the judge in April.

'It would have been easy to do so... It is clear he spotted the game from the aircraft, landed and using his spotting scope at the camp immediately found the game again and set out with a firearm to search it.

'While the firearm was laid aside during the final stalking phase, this did not mean there was no previous hunting.' What is critical is that he immediately set out searching for game while carrying a firearm without waiting the required time.'

In the current B.C. legislation, there is nothing that says guiding and hunting are mutually exclusive, Milne noted.

'There is no exemption in the definition of hunt' for guides, perhaps there should be, but the court will not expand a definition by creating an exclusion or exemption for guides,' he wrote.

The hunting too soon after deplaning offence attracted the largest fine $3,000. The two Wildlife Act convictions for false reporting each attracted $1,500 penalties, while the regulation offence of guiding too many hunters at a time cost Schumacher $2,000.

The fines are on the low end of the range as all but the last attract a maximum penalty of $50,000. The guiding regulation infraction can cost a guide up to $25,000.

The provincial Crown stayed charges of hunting mountain sheep outside of open season, unlawfully possessing a dead sheep, failing to remove the edible portions of caribou to his home, to a meat cutter or a cold storage plant, failing to comply with conditions in a client's species licence and guiding more than two hunters at once.